Folks on X discovered what appears to be a pattern of toxic lending.

Toxic lending is when you lend money in exchange for a right to get shares at ridiculously low prices in the event of a default.

The deal here is pretty straight forward:

1. Microstrategy gets to build up a vault of real (enough) assets worth far more than its products and services in the market.
2. Lenders get an insane amount of shares in reserve waiting for a default.
3. Microstrategy defaults. They quietly massively short the company at high values. Think like 50%-100% its float.
4. Lenders get their cheap shares from Microstrategy and give them to the brokerages that lent them shares.

Saylor and his allies are left diluted in their stock holding, but the company has real assets behind it. Company goes to trash, but it has enough assets that it can liquidate and ensure they're set for life.

IPv4 and NAT make it very difficult to nail particular users with the kind of speed. When law enforcement sends search warrants to an ISP, it can take weeks or months for the ISP to find time to dig through their logs and find the exact customer. I think federal law also requires a certain amount of money to exchange hands to cover the burden to a business having to execute a search warrant on behalf of law enforcement in cases like that where both the cops and business need to ensure a limited, scope search and seizure.

The RIAA's argument is "we're so important, we can give you a list of a few MP3s and an IPv4 address and tell you to sort it out or we'll sue." It doesn't take a genius to realize that the SCOTUS is likely to turn a baleful eye toward an argument that amounts to "we can trash due process because we're a business."

I'd wager the RIAA has a higher chance of a 9-0 "GTFO" ruling than a mixed bag.

Several years ago, my dad was complaining about all of the corruption that "came in with Bill Clinton." My dad was in federal law enforcement, and it's actually true that a huge swath of federal law enforcement (particularly the FBI) did start to become noticeably more corrupt in the 90s if you paid attention to police accountability and civil liberties stuff.

After letting him rant for a while, I pointed out to him that it wasn't Clinton but what Clinton represented which was a generational changeover with the Silents and WWII generation giving his generation power. Even the "60s generation conservatives" are noticeably more corrupt than their parents and grandparents' generations of conservatives.

I would say that the Baby Boomers are the first generation to embrace a truly toxic, dyscivic form of individualism that is also highly collectivist at the same time. That's why we have such a schizophrenic social investment and safety net. It's why we have millionaire baby boomers calling financially successful Millennials and Zoomers like me "entitled Socialists" because we want to force Social Security back to FDR's vision of being an income supplement for older folks whose bodies and minds are wearing out rapidly. It's also how they can justify tearing down the system that made college affordable for them and justify all of this out of control government behavior.

The fact is that generally speaking, the adults in the room are more likely to be Gen X and Millennial, not our parents. The man/woman-children generation is controlling both parties in a way that is leading younger Millennials and Zoomers to turn to extremists out of raw desperation because our moderates vary from "weak-willed and useless" to "actively corrupt and facilitating the immolation of our system."

I asked Gemini this question:

what percentage of bills in the uk parliament originated from the EU before brexit

Response:

Estimates of how much UK legislation originated from the EU vary, but a study by the
House of Commons Library found that between 1993 and 2014, 13% of UK Acts of Parliament and Statutory Instruments had an EU influence. This figure rises significantly to around 62% if you include non-legislative EU regulations that apply in the UK, notes the BBC.

        The calculation of 13% includes only primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) and secondary legislation (Statutory Instruments) where the EU was the source or influence.
        The 62% figure is based on a broader count that includes all EU-influenced laws, not just UK Acts and Statutory Instruments.
        The impact is also greater in certain sectors like trade, agriculture, and financial services, where EU influence was more substantial

It's hard to call the UK a functioning democratic state when most of what the national assembly does is basically working out laws that implement regulations that originate outside of it.

In any rational debate, Brexit would be understood as voters sacrificing economic gains for sovereignty and a return to Parliament functioning as it traditionally did. Rubber-stamping regulations from the EU or other bodies over 60% of the time its working on legislation is a major deviation from the ancient purpose of Parliament.

Assuming the GPUs aren't unusable due to wear, they can be repurposed to provide low cost services.

I've worked on projects where they'd have spent millions of dollars on renting GPUs per quarter if the AWS sales pitch was "these are so last 3 years, but they're dirt cheap for letting your data scientists experiment."

I think he's 100% over the target about the accounting side, but I think he is potentially underestimating how much money corporations would be willing to throw at "old GPUs" that are substantially cheaper per hour to rent.

Let's face it, in 3-5 years the Nvidia 50X series on the market right now will be "old" but still very powerful. More than powerful enough to do A LOT of GPU-centric work.

The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform"

The Switch 2 is perfectly capable of running the Master Chief Collection, Halo 5 and Halo Infinite, but they've gone radio silent on updating on all of those plans to "support the Switch."

So you have to ask the obvious question: do they fear Nintendo or something?

By current estimates, the Switch 2 has already globally sold about 10M units, and it's only been out since June. Therefore, there's no reason for them to act like it's a Wii U tier risk.

The whole discussion around Web 3.0 is based around building blockchain-based payment into web browsers, and frankly, that might save huge swaths of the human-generated internet. Paywalls will be efficient, easy to make and decentralized. Think Brave's reward programs, but with actual USD, Euro, etc. by sending stable coins over low-cost networks like Solana and XRPL.

Regardless, the overarching problem the web faces now is that AI is actively consuming human-generated content and completely replacing it.

Are the kind of people who tanked Bioware by acting like Cartman in that recent South Park episode where he kept saying "put a chick in it and make it gay and lame."

That studio went from the heights of games like KOTOR and the original Mass Effect triology to the absolute sales dumpster fire of Veilguard because it was a bad game written by super activist types. The "creative team" at Bioware is even threatening SA with retaliation if they "censor the gay stuff" in Mass Effect 4.

SA absolutely should threaten to censor them for no other reason than to fire everyone who is more concerned about things like "queer representation" than making a game worthy of following up the original triology.

EA is sitting on a lot of valuable IP but with a lot of people who need to be purged because they're abusing the hell out of the IP for their own agenda.

The coins were burned as in destroyed?

They're a Layer 2 coin and ledger entries at that level are literally designed to be manipulated by the blockchain as part of the "smart contract" support.

Smart contracts are what enables the cool stuff on modern blockchains. Making "programmable money" that can be integrated with other software that hooks into the blockchain.

Layer 2 coins are not low level assets like ETH, BTC, XRP, etc. They're outputs from smart contracts that are fueled by spending the Layer 1 coin to execute a smart contract transaction.

People make decisions everyday that I don't like and affect me negatively. Too fucking bad.

And back in the real world, when a dad gambles away the family money and the kids end up on welfare, we can't criminally prosecute him for social parasitism (the one criminal law from the USSR that sounds great IMHO).

When parents become dysfunctional addicts, society picks up the tab for them and their kids. When dysfunctional addicts in general cause problems, society picks up the tab.

If people want that "real freedom," then they should have to sign a waiver with the government where the moment they become a burden to society financially or criminally they can be at a minimum turned into a felon for "social parasitism."

Society is much MUCH more aware of the psychology and physiology of addiction in 2025 than it was even in the 1990s. That's why we're seeing a steady reduction in alcohol consumption and why a big chunk of Gen Z is radicalizing against the porn industry.

Regardless of your opinion on gambling, porn, drinking, drugs, etc. for "people who can handle it," a lot of people simply can't. They have addiction-sensitive personalities and are more aware of that.

The vice industries don't want speed bumps and regulation on their business models, especially with younger people. That's literally how they recruit the next generation of customers, and society needs to clamp down HARD on marketing, software development, etc. meant to entice younger people to vice industries.

We know too much about addiction today to continue to pretend that it's not in the public interest to actively punish companies that leverage the psychology of addiction to make money.

What we really need is to create a working group in the FTC with UX specialists, psychologists and other professionals who can study the way industry works and put forward regulations for the FTC.

It should target the design, not speech. If necessary, it should require an entire redesign or elimination of entire use cases like YT shorts or able to tell TikTok "if this is all you provide, you'll have to find an entirely new business model."

The West is already descending into demographic warfare between retirees and workers, and the former have electoral cohesion and numbers on their side to continue forcing the workers to fund them. China has a good chance of avoiding this because their elderly can't vote themselves a bigger share of the workers' wages.

Like it or not, that's a potentially huge advantage of not being democratic. China can just decide one day say to retirees "you're drunk, go home and stop demanding more of the workers' wages" and just call out their army if the old farts try to riot.

In 2024, the US hit a $700B deficit between SS/Medicare taxes and actual expenditures. Congress also voted to give another unfunded COL increase. As crazy it may sound, in 10-20 years, China could be much more attractive to young Western workers if things don't change.

Sounds like that recent deal between Oracle and OpenAI where the latter promised to spend $300B on cloud resources from the former, starting conveniently in 2027 which is far enough down the road that both sides can claim "markets shifted" when accused of fraud by Oracle shareholders. OpenAI, of course, doesn't have anywhere near that much cash on hand.

Nvidia is sitting on $56B in cash. This smells like the same deal: keep propping up OpenAI with meaningless commitments to keep the AI bubble going.

My daughter is going to graduate from the University of Toronto next April, with a bachelor's degree in geography and a minor in English, and then a Master's of Education.

In Real World USA, 2025 Edition this would be a recipe for economic disaster. It would be parental malpractice to send your daughter to a university for this education, at that debt level, in this job market (and likely future job markets). You would be literally better off telling her to work a full time job at McDonalds for $15-$20/hr for 4 years, live at home, save 80% of her paycheck and gift her that tuition money to buy a small piece of property.

Given how student debt works in the US, if you can't hit the ground running into a field that makes at least the local average household income, our student lending system will flay your earning potential alive if you hit high 5 to low 6 figures by the time of graduation. The outliers would be people who live like an extreme version of Dave Ramsey's get out of debt plan.